Howard Zinn.

Died today of a heart attack, aged 87. May he rest peacefully. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and many admirers. The old radical cutting his last class short to encourage his pupils to picket is a perfect picture for that obit, too.

Students often ask what I think of Zinn’s People’s History. I generally point them to Michael Kazin’s great essay on Zinn’s history, which—whatever you think of his politics or activism—is well worth your reading.1

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10 comments

Thank you for pointing to Kazin’s essay. When I read Zinn’s book in the mid-1980s I remember thinking “Oh, come on” a few times, or perhaps more than a few times, but Kazin expresses my thoughts about it better than I ever did. I was already in my mid-30s when I read it, which may have made me cynical about even Zinn’s cynicism.

Just to add to what I say there and what you say here, Eric: the one place where I think Kazin is wrong is judging Zinn’s impact on the left (such as it is) through a reading of the rather two-dimensional history in his tome. Long before the People’s History appeared, Zinn had been active in the civil rights movement, perhaps most significantly during his years at Spelman College in Atlanta in the ’50s and ’60s. And he really has been an inspiration to three generations of activists. I agree with Kazin that Zinn’s vision of history is cramped and dualistic. And I certainly wish that the many (non-historian) activists I’ve met who have been inspired by him had a more subtle guide to the American past. But however fatalistic Zinn’s vision (and however fair Kazin is to his scholarship), I think it’s unfair to Zinn’s activism to accuse him of further marginalizing the left, as Kazin does in the conclusion of his otherwise thoughtful essay.

I’ve never felt strongly about Howard Zinn, because Marxist history is still par for the course in Japanese historiography: Of course you write history from below, put the masses at the center; of course elites are oppressive and grasping, and classes are in conflict. So I never got the big deal over A People’s History…, except that it would make a good supplement in conjunction with a more traditional textbook.

I found Kazin’s critique to be wrong-headed overall, because he responds to Zinn as if he were trying to be Hobsbawm or, I guess, an updated version of Charles Beard. But Zinn presented APHotUS as a corrective to the standard narrative, rather than a replacement for it, and everyone I’ve ever talked to about him took the book as “the other side” of the story. There are still problems with it in that regard, but that would involve a significantly different critique from the one Kazin offered.

You guys are all academics. You are not and were not the audience for Zinn’s “People’s History”. This “history” is a popularization of Zinn’s philosophy and a progressive interpretation for high school students and less educated folks.

It is doing its job in many school districts (as someone mentioned) counter-balancing the standard text and perhaps leading folks to other obscure historians like Carey McWilliams, C. Wright Mills, and Dean Baker.